It has all been a bit hectic here at La Godefrere with visitors arriving and leaving and we are all a bit disrupted here at La Godefrere. Our current visitors (old work friends of mine) have gone off for the day to visit the Mont St Michel, so a chance to catch up with the blog.

The cats are just getting over a week with two dogs here. The dogs came with my son and daughter in law. They were staying in the gite but spent some time in the house. Archie was fine as he just stands his ground when the dogs come over and if necessary arches his back and hisses. The dogs get the message. Unfortunately, Moggie tends to run away and so the dogs chase him. He has plenty of safe spots to run to and when there is food he becomes much braver.


Archie takes precedence when food is around!

We also had our youngest daughter, Amy here with partner Charlotte. They are both vegan so it provides a bit of a challenge to find vegan food but also to find restaurants that can provide a vegan option. Mrs. Parish is now getting very good at selecting vegan friendly products in our local supermarket. So, at home we were fine.

Eating out can be more difficult but last week we went to a local village restaurant that we visit quite frequently. We arranged to give the owner/chef, Ann-Sophie notice of the vegans and she prepared a special menu just for them which was very good. The next day we visited our favourite restaurant, La Marjolaine and again with due notice they prepared an exceptional vegan menu for the girls who had a great time.

The arrival of visitors meant that we also had a special delivery of essential supplies, which for us, being English is a supply of quality tea bags! The French tend to drink tea without milk and have tea with various flavours or aromas. You can get English tea in the supermarkets but it can be expensive. So, when visitors ask what can they bring? WE always ask for teabags. We were on the point of running out when our son arrived with a large catering pack of Yorkshire teas, and this was followed up by our current guests who also arrived with several boxes of Yorkshire tea. So, we are safe for a good while now.


Essential supplies

Also, arriving this week have been our first swallows of the summer. We saw two of them on 31st March, a day earlier than last year. Since then we have seen them every day and at least three. They have started to investigate our neighbours wood shed where they nested last year. To our great delight, we have also welcomed back out lovely pair of little owls who have once again taken up their nesting site under the apex of the gite roof. We have seen both the male and female at the nest hole and they have been sat on the TV aerial and the gite roof during the day. At night, they have done a lot of calling especially when our cats walk under the site.


The little owl on the TV aerial

With the warm weather, there have also been quite a few butterflies and we had to see if the fire salamander was in the water meter pit. Sure enough it is still there along with his little frog friend who is also down in the pit. We have also seen regularly the roe deer and some hares. We are now awaiting the awakening of the bats and we will have almost a full complement of fauna. Any day now we expect to hear the sound of the hoopoes arriving

All is well here at La Godefrere and our menagerie of animals is assembling for our gite paying visitors who start to arrive in the middle of April. Archie and Moggie certainly are practising their “look at me and see how cute I am” routines or the alternative “look at how thin I am, we never get fed here”. They see our visitors as a password for food and are experts at extortion and theft!

Sorry the blog is a couple of days late and a bit shorter than usual. Hopefully when all our visitors have departed we can get back to some sort of normality. Although I am not really sure that “normality” is the right word! At least I should be able to come up with a couple of pages of hot news on life at La Godefrere.

Anyway, the guests are cooking this evening. Some sort of mushroom risotto as we have a vegetarian with us. It sounds good and I must go and source some appropriate wines for tonight. That of course assumes that Alan, who is driving doesn’t rely on his satnav or else they may not get back. We did give them a map as an alternative but Alan has already got lost at least once so far. 

Bonne journee
Graham